I Need to Improve on my Home Improvements
I’ve just bought a house. Now what would be the first thing you would do?
Crack open the champagne? Tell your friends and family? Start packing? Nope, the first thing I did was ceremoniously create a new Board on Pinterest called ‘My House’. And fill it. Fill, fill, fill, fill it full of all the things I will never be able to find/afford/remember. And I haven’t come off my laptop since…
So, in the place of the customs of old where an enthusiastic flick through the IKEA catalogue with a wad of Post It notes constituted thorough interior design research, I have virtual boards for every nook and crevice in my new home. I have ‘Storage Ideas’ (no Crap Drawer for me, oh no, my Cellotape, drawing pins and string will have their own homes), ‘Colour Charts’ (I want everything white, my kids are 5 and 3 but I’m still sticking with white. Okay?), ‘Swimming Pools’ (yes plural, and what?) and ‘Bedroom Designs’ (complete with 20sqm walk-in wardrobes with colour-coded shoe rails and secret jewellery hiding solutions). I have a budget for a house I have to live in, yet I am researching the home that the millionaire, childless, skinny, 21 year old me will live in. Which is so not a waste of my time…no sireee.
And while I have been busily living in the land of ‘what the fuck are you on, you disillusioned woman’ I am fast running out of time to get my arse down to the local B&Q and compare prices of thrilling items such as oven extractors and radiators. You know, important stuff that I will need more than stenciled jupe throw cushions and hand carved curtain ties from the foothill of Mongolia. But other stuff is so boring. Honest to God if I have to look at another row of bathroom taps I will smash my head against the nozzle and bore a hole in my skull. I hate them all because they all have those red and blue dots on them so you know which way to turn them. Yes, it may stop you scalding yourself, but red and blue aren’t in my bathroom colour scheme. White is. Just white.
I shouldn’t be surprised that things are getting a bit carried away, it’s not the first time I have got a little, shall we say, over enthusiastic about a project. As soon as my husband and I signed the paperwork for the house he looked at me in his ‘I have to say this, even if it means a fight’ way and said, ‘please, don’t let this go the way the wedding planning did.’ Which was his polite way of saying ‘for fuck’s sake, we are not rich and we don’t have anything to prove to anyone. I’m happy for you to make all the style choices, but there is a long list of stuff to be done and I don’t care how you do it, just don’t get bat-shit crazy. Again.’
To which I thought – ‘Too late suckeeeeer.’
So our house warming party is in a few weeks time, and everything is just perfect.
When you get here please bear in mind that you may need to pee in the bushes as I didn’t bother wasting money on ugly boring toilets, and the Belfast ceramic sinks are all installed but no taps as, well, they had red and blue on them. So please wash your hands in the swimming pool. Oh yes, did I mention I got that? It doesn’t matter that there is now no access to the front door unless you swim there and that the neighbours accidentally parked in the pool yesterday, because it looks just like the one on my Pinterest board. And I don’t have to worry about the kids’ safety anymore either as I managed to swap my children for a lovely set of pure white linen sofas…I even got the jupe stenciled cushions thrown in for free!
Who said house renovations were hard work?
